They reveal they’ve already got a prototype web server and a Chrome client with built-in SPDY support that they’ve been testing in the lab. With these tools they’ve reportedly been able to see an up to 55% speed increase in page loading, and feel like the project is now stable enough to warrant soliciting feedback from the web community.

AMD will ship the six-core Opteron processor code-named Istanbul in May, a month earlier than expected, with servers based on the chip appearing in June. The processor will be an upgrade from AMD’s current quad-core Opteron chips code-named Shanghai. Further details about the Istanbul chip are expected at an AMD event on Wednesday.

The chips offer better performance while drawing the same amount of power as quad-core Shanghai server chips, AMD officials have said. Servers with eight Istanbul chips could offer the processing power of up to 48 cores.

I can’t say I’ve tried this application yet, but it looks like more bang than I’ve seen before at this prioce point (i.e. free). If you have a CIO that has just tasked you with saving a bundle of cash by replacing clunky commodity equipment with high-priced, name-brand, high-falutin’ enterprise goodies … this might be useful.

Anyway the term TCO is still present today but in a wider sense of course, though there is no common standard of how to get comparable TCO-figures unfortunately.

This is where the TCO-Tool may help: A well defined Cost-Model linked to a transparently modelled system (Base-Information or TCO-Objects) shall be the base for standardized and interpretable TCO-comparisons.

As it turns out, ValleyWag took the right approach to this story. But their final prescription of “suck it up, pal” might be short sighted. Maybe the correct tone to take is: “so stop whining and start signing executive orders”. I’d start by pointing out that using Windows to ensure national security sounds a lot like using gasoline to quench a fire.

This is not a story about digital pioneers getting cast back into the Stone Age; it’s about a privileged elite learning how the rest of the country has to work. Those “six-year-old versions of Microsoft software”? That must mean Windows XP. If you haven’t noticed, most people still prefer XP over Microsoft’s clunky, buggy, annoying new Vista. Here’s a suggestion for the Obamans: Stop whining about the tools taxpayers have paid for, and get to work learning how to cope with what your employer gives you, just like the rest of us.

One of the things they discovered is that the business community is largely unaware of the costs of running an e-mail account. Many of those surveyed gave guesses from $2 to $11 per user, although a detailed accounting showed that the costs were often several times that (Forrester came up with $25.18 per month, compared with $8.47 for Gmail). Part of the problem is that costs are often split among several cost centers, with software licenses part of a different department’s budget from the salaries of the people that support it. In some cases, the e-mail system was running on older hardware that had initially been bought for a different purpose and had been depreciated.

An Obama administration, he says, would want to take a look at reforming the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) — the rules that control the export and import of defense-related technologies and services.

This poll over at the Reg points to a disconnect between what we think we are doing and what is actually happening with IT governance. Might you conclude that half of the IT governance organizations are pointless? You might. You might.

Top of the priority list was keeping a clear technical view – either of the software or the hardware infrastructure, but other types of co-ordination were in vogue in less than a quarter of respondent organisations … this finding seems stranger still when compared to the fact that over 40% of respondents have some kind of co-ordination body in place – might it be reasonable to ask, what exactly these people are doing…?

Twenty years ago, a new field was born that soon came to be known as enterprise architecture. This paper covers a broad introduction to the field of enterprise architecture. Although the history of the field goes back 20 years, the field is still evolving—and rapidly so. (36 printed pages)

But in the long run, the goal of all these service modeling efforts is to apply the same rigors that have accompanied enterprise software development to web services. The idea is that services shouldn’t be exposed just because they are there. Ultimately, service modeling may face competition from BPM users such as business analysts and process owners, as they perceive service modeling as a way to steal their thunder.